


Fish in the Sea

by amalli



Series: Of Returns and Reunions [2]
Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, M/M, Reincarnation, Triad - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-15
Updated: 2018-03-15
Packaged: 2019-03-31 14:49:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13977384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amalli/pseuds/amalli
Summary: There's a story, about the people she sees sometimes, when the water is still. They're not always there but Xion doesn't know what to make of them when they are.Or, Xion learns about her own power.





	Fish in the Sea

She’s always liked the sea.

When she was just a little child, she’d play in the shallows, safe under her parents’ watch. She was born near the seaside, she was raised with it. It was her constant companion, teaching her about the push and pull of the tides, the storms and how water can erode stone into sand. And as she grew up, so did the shadows in the sea.

She remembers the first time she saw someone in the water, at eight years old. The tide was just coming back in, so Xion was scrambling to grab the last few seashells.  
Right as she went to grab one last one, the tide swept in over her hand. In the moment when the water is caught between push and pull, that one moment of hesitation when it goes still, Xion saw a girl with her eyes and red hair looking back at her. 

She dropped her collection of shells onto the beach, forgotten.

There are a few girls she sees from time to time, shades in still waters. They all have her eyes. 

The less she looks for them, the easier they are to make out. Sometimes her dreams would even tell her their names. Naminé, Kairi, Aqua. Sometimes, she would sit by the tide pools and talk to them. She’d tell them about how her day had been, about a project she had to turn in soon at school. She wasn’t always able to see them. 

It’s a habit she keeps up, even after she moves away to college. She doesn’t have a sea a block away from her house anymore, but she talks to the bath before she gets in, more often than not. Sometimes when she thinks she’s alone she pours herself a glass of water, sits down at the kitchen counter and talks to which ever one shows up that day. She finds it cathartic.

So one time she’s sitting at the counter, talking to a glass of water with Kairi’s reflection in it, when Roxas drifts out of the bedroom they all share. 

She stops abruptly. He gives her a look like she’s insane.

“Who were you talking to?”

She glances down at the water, and to her complete and utter lack of surprise, Kairi is gone. 

“So you know how you can basically summon keys and Axel burns sometimes?” she starts. 

“Yeah?”

“This is mine,” she gestures at the water.

“What do you do?” Despite this being her most closely guarded secret, he’s not reacting much. Well, all three of them have weird powers.

“I’m not sure if I’m doing it or if I’m just seeing it.” Well, that came out good. Totally didn’t just sound like a crazy person. “But sometimes I see Kairi or Naminé in the reflections of the water. You know, people I was- am, connected to. From before.”

Roxas looks at the glass of highly uncooperative water. “I don’t see anyone.”

“Thank you, smartass, she’s not there anymore.”

“But she was, a minute ago?”

“Yeah, I tend to just kinda prattle at them from time to time. I used to go to the sea by my house, but that was before college. I didn’t know you were still here.” 

“Yeah, morning class got cancelled.”

“Ah.”

He was still looking at the water when he put a soothing hand on her shoulder. “Next time, you wanna show me? I’d love to see.” He presses a quick kiss on her temple and wanders off towards the bathroom. 

Xion is willing to admit that she did not expect that.

 

Having two boyfriends, sometimes things are a little awkward. Sure, sometimes it’s as unimportant as whose turn it is to be the coveted middle spoon, but sometimes it’s the awkward looks her friends give her when she tells them that she has two instead of one.

“You’re in love with two people?” they ask her, usually either confused or vaguely affronted.

“So what if I am,” she tells them.

 

“Do you ever just want to scream at people to stop disappointing you?” she mutters into her ice cream bowl one evening. Ice cream understands, this she knows.

Axel stops flipping through the channels to look at her. “Did something happen?” he asks.

“People are disappointing.”

“Yes, I got that much.” He scoots closer to her on the couch and wraps his arms around her waist. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I feel like I’ll explode if I do.”

“Well, I’m fireproof,” he tells her, cocky grin on his face, lights dancing in his eyes. She snorts in laughter, and nearly gets ice cream up her nose. “You can explode if you need to.”

“I just wish that when people tell you they’re your friend, they care about you, that they would actually _act_ like it for _once_.” She can feel tears starting to well up in her eyes. “Goddammit, I don’t want to cry.”

“It’s okay if you do, you know,” he murmurs. He rests his head on her shoulder. 

“Yeah?” Her voice wobbles as she says it.

“Yeah.”

So she cries as she tells him about how one of her oldest friends doesn’t talk to her anymore, how she makes time for anyone and everyone but Xion. How she misses her friend, how she wishes things could still be like they used to be.

It’s personal and has nothing to do with her relationship with Axel and Roxas, but just because they aren’t involved doesn’t mean that Axel holding her doesn’t help.

 

Xion has always been comfortable being adrift. Her first year at college, the separation didn’t bother her. Where others suffered from homesickness, she had trouble relating. She couldn’t bring herself to care when she functionally abandoned her dorm room for Axel’s apartment, and the change of moving in with him when she became a sophomore barely phased her.

Being unmoored from her home, her sea, didn’t matter to her so long as she had her people with her. Her mother is always a phone call away, and her boys are so much closer. Unmoored, maybe, but still attached in the ways that matter.

She searches for attachments in other people. She looks for Kairi and Naminé and Aqua, just in case they exist outside of reflections in the water. She hasn’t found them yet.

 

They all go back home during Thanksgiving break. Xion’s parents come pick her up, the family chattering together all the way back home on the two hour drive. 

The first thing she does when she gets home is dump her stuff on her bed, hug her parents one more time, and say at least fifty times that yes, she’ll be home in time for dinner, she just wants to take a quick walk around the neighborhood. 

She turns left out the front door and walks straight for the seashore. 

It’s a cloudy November midafternoon, chilly and not terribly comfortable. Still, she hops over the guard railing, rolls up the legs of her jeans, and tucks her shoes in their usual hiding place. 

The salt water is too cold for a proper swim this time of year, but she doesn’t mind the chill over her feet too much. She promised her parents she wouldn’t be gone long, and she knows that’s not a promise she’d be able to break with bare feet.

The path to the tide pools proves that coming over at this time of day was a little pointless. The tide is coming in, flooding the shallow pools. 

She knows better than to expect to find one of the shades with the water like this. They’re a bit unreliable at best, but if there’s one rule she’s figured out in the years she’s seen them it’s that the water needs to be still, and the flooded tide pools won’t cast a reflection. 

Still, she spends a few minutes sitting on a rock with her feet in the shallows, feeling the push and pull of the sea in her skin until her feet go numb.

 

It’s really strange being around her parents again after living without them. They’re so excited to have their only daughter back with them that they seem to forget to even ask her about her grades or her classes. They ask her about her friends, her roommates, with her father reminding her, solemn and strangely fatherly for once, that if either Roxas or Axel ever do anything to her he will come get her the second she calls. She rolls her eyes at him and tells him she’s never felt safer than with her two boys. 

At least he’s supportive. 

She drifts out of the house each day and walks to the tide pools.

Sometimes she finds one of the shades in the water.

It’s way too cold to do so, but she sticks her feet in the water anyway. She stays as utterly still as she can.

“It’s really been crazy, Aqua. I swear, I know the teachers don’t do it on purpose when they all have their assignments due on the same week, but I’m still pissed off that one teacher gave us a take-home exam due when we get back from break. Like seriously, what part of _break_ does not mean _break?_ ”

She’s not sure the first time she hears a chuckle. She’s imagined one of the shades actually talking or moving or _anything_ for so long now that when she actually hears something she doesn’t believe it at first. 

She still looks though.

Usually, the shades don’t move. They’re flat, and expressionless, and really only useful to her as a willing sounding board. 

Aqua’s moving, though.

In the warped perspective of the water, she’s sitting on the stone next to Xion, and to Xion’s utter shock she’s actually moving around, her hand covering up her mouth as she laughs.  
“Did you just-” Maybe she is crazy, maybe this is all in her head. “Did you just _laugh_ at me?”

When Aqua’s mouth moves, Xion can barely hear anything. In a reasonable, thematically appropriate way, it sounds like Aqua is talking underwater. 

Xion can read lips just well enough that with the actual, garbled sound she can make out what Aqua says.

_“Sorry.”_

Xion is torn between being elated, and confused, and _trying really hard to not move her feet where they’re still in the water._

“Can you hear me?” Xion asks.

Aqua nods.

“Can you tell me where you are?”

 

The next day, during the breaks she takes while doing the stupid take-home exam, she looks for Aqua online.

Google really is a fantastic thing.

She plugs the number in her phone and dials.

It connects on the third ring.

“Xion?” 

 

She moment she’s back with her boys and her parents are gone she’s jumping up and down. 

“You guys will _not_ believe who I found over break,” she tells them. “I found Aqua!”

The boys exchange a quick look. 

“Sorry, who?” Roxas finally says.

“Tall, blue hair, really good with magic back in the old days?” she offers. No reaction. “You guys might not have met. She was connected to Kairi originally, actually gave her a keyblade, and since I was originally the memory of how Sora saw Kairi, I kinda got connected to her as well. She’s really sweet.

“Anyway,” she pauses, trying to figure out how to explain. “So you know how my power has kinda been being able to see them in water sometimes? Well, I was talking to her over break and she _actually talked back!_ And communication is a bit tricky but she managed to tell me enough that I was able to find her phone number and I kinda invited her over here for a few days this weekend.”

Axel starts first. “Wait, she’s coming here soon?”

“Yeah, she works at a company an hour and a half north of here, and she told me she’s taking the Thursday and Friday off to come visit.”

Axel looks at Roxas. “So do you wanna clean up or do you want to try and figure out how to make the couch into a bed?”

Roxas snorts. “You say that like you have no idea. I’ll do the couch, you do the kitchen.”

“Why does the kitchen need cleaning?” Xion asks. She leans over, trying to look through the doorway into the kitchen. She did get back a few days after the other two, who knows what they might have done in that time. 

“Er,” starts Axel. “You might want to wait here.”

“Axel, what on earth did you do.”

 

This version of Aqua is a lawyer. “Well, not quite a lawyer yet,” she corrects her, “I’m a paralegal at the moment.” She’s flowy, poised, and eloquent, to say the least. She’s twenty nine to Xion’s nineteen, and it shows. 

“I’ve been trying to get a handle on these powers for so long now,” Aqua tells her. “I’ve watched you grow up, in a way.” 

Yeah, Xion’s suddenly a bit embarrassed about what she might have said to her shades when she was thirteen. 

“But the good news,” Aqua goes on, “is that I’ve figured out quite a bit of it. And if we’re lucky, I should be able to teach it to you.”

She goes over to the sink, turns on the faucet, and with a smooth motion of her hand, the stream of water bends up against gravity, suspended in the air until it swoops lazily into the empty glass in Xion’s hand.

She turns off the faucet. Xion fails to get her jaw off the ground. 

 

Between talking about her boys and Aqua’s boys, Xion tries to pick up some of the skill that Aqua has. 

“Terra and Ven, they’re strong in their own ways,” Aqua says, deftly stepping out of the way of the splash, “but still, whenever there’s a spider, I’m the one who has to deal with it.”

Xion tries to pick up the water off the ground as she snickers at that. “I wonder what Kairi and Naminé are like.” 

“You’re the first I’ve found, so far. Naminé and Kairi aren’t often close enough to water for me to see them, let alone talk to them.”

“Must have really helped, then, the way that I talk to the water all the time.” The water crashes back to the floor again.

“It did, yes. But I’m still working at this, power I guess you could call it. It’s hard to talk back,” Aqua tells her. “Breathe. Don’t try to force it so much. It’s a sympathetic power, I’ve found.”

Xion breathes in and exhales slowly, trying to roll out some of the tension in her shoulders. She tries again.

“It was hard understanding you, through the tide pools.” Xion admits.

Aqua gives her a gentle smile. “It all worked out, though, didn’t it?”

Xion is actually starting to get it, when Axel comes out of the kitchen with a veritable platter of baked goods in his hands. 

“Can I offer either of you something to eat? Fresh out of the oven,” Axel says, and the water that Xion had barely been holding up flops back onto the floor. She levels a look at her boyfriend. 

“I was doing so well,” she grouses, and takes a cookie from him. 

“I bring you delicious food, and you complain,” he says, and then actually leans over to pinch her cheek like she’s a child. 

She blinks at him.

Then she raises a hand, and the water leaps off the floor to smack him in the face. Not on the food, though, she’s as careful of that as she can be.

“Okay, I kind of deserved that,” he shrugs.

“I told you,” Aqua laughs, “it’s a sympathetic power.”

 

Aqua might have had a decade more practice she has, but her new mentor tells her that she’s learned the bulk of what she’s figured out in that time frame. “Just teach me when you learn something new, okay?” Aqua tells her as she’s going out the door.

She doesn’t have much of a use for these powers other than party tricks, but goddamn is she proud of them.

 

There’s a pool at the rec center in town, and one lazy Friday evening the three of them make the trip over to lounge around in the hot tub there. They’re celebrating Roxas finishing up an engineering project and Xion’s newfound prowess with water, so a hot tub sounded like a good way to unwind.

They’re alone at the pool, and Xion can actually feel how they move in the water. It’s a bit uncanny, how she can feel her surroundings with her power. She can feel the shape of the pool, the web of plumbing nestled in the walls of the building. There’s a sauna in another room, and Xion can feel the shape of the steam. 

“I wonder what you two will be able to do, some day,” she tells them, lost in memory.

 

Roxas shakes her awake one night. The nightmare fractures, and she’s left tense under her covers and cold with sweat.

“Xion?” He speaks softly, like he knows how rattled she is.

She breathes in heavily, and tries to relax. She’s shaking, though, and it doesn’t work very well.

“What were you dreaming about?”

“I-” God, but her throat feels so rough. “I was dreaming about the time that we were fighting. When I died. When I knew that I either had to kill you or you had to kill me. I was so scared at the time, Roxas, I didn’t know if I wanted to go through with it, or- or-” She breaks off, and Roxas takes the hint to hug her. She’s a bit of a mess, crying and cold, but he doesn’t shy away from any of that.

“Want me to get you some tea?” he offers.

“Please.”

He tucks her back into her blankets and comes back in a few minutes with a mug steaming of chamomile. 

She’s halfway through the tea before either of them speaks. 

“Do you think the nightmares will ever go away?” she asks.

“I have no idea. Probably not.”

She scoffs. “What a delightful concept.”

“Yeah, I know.”

She drains the mug, setting it aside and pulls him back around her. “Thanks for the tea,” she murmurs into his skin.

He rubs her back a little and kisses her on the top of the head. “Do you want me to go?”

“No, you should stay. I don’t really want to be alone right now. Where’s Axel, anyway?”

“Working late at the library. He should be home soon.”

She snakes a hand under his shirt. He shifts closer so she can reach more of him, and she pulls him down to kiss her. He pulls away soon, though, sooner than she’d like. “I don’t think now’s a good time for you.”

“Are you saying you don’t want me?”

He kisses her again, smiling a little. “You know I love you, Xion.” 

She feels something tight in her chest calm down at that. She settles back into bed, and buries herself under the blankets. “I know.” Roxas gets up from the bed and changes out of his jeans. He gets under the covers with her, curling up next to her. 

They’re asleep and have sprawled out on the bed when Axel finally gets home. 

His boyfriend and his girlfriend tangled up together, leaving remarkably little room for him on the bed.

 

When Xion was a little kid, she’d try to drag her parents to the beach any day the weather was nice enough. When she got older, she’d just go on her own, and tried to play in the shallows with the other girls she saw in the water. She’d dream of them, of their names and what they were like in a world that didn’t make much sense to Xion. 

When Xion wakes up in the morning, before either of her boys, with one of Axel’s legs hooked across her own and Roxas snoring into her hair on her other side, she wonders what she would tell herself, age nine, if she could tell herself what those shades meant for her and what the dreams would lead her to.

Xion thinks she’d smile and tell herself that she’ll be so happy.


End file.
